“Over the years I’ve often quoted David H. Rothman of Alexandria, Va., a pioneer in the entire field of electronic reading devices,” writes James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, in an article about U.S. infrastructure that was published earlier this morning on The Atlantic‘s website. “[Rothman]was talking about his “Teleread” proposal many, many years [before] products like the Kindle, Nook, or iPad had been conceived.”

David Rothman

In the same post, Fallows also emphasizes Rothman’s philosophy of e-readers as “‘public goods’ and indispensable parts of the modern infrastructure of the 21st century, in much the way public libraries were in Europe and North America through the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Comments:

Congrats to David. Back in 2006-2007 when I was working on the Smashwords business plan, David’s writing at Teleread helped inform me about not only where the ebook revolution would go, but where it *should* go to best serve the needs of authors and readers alike.